Alphabet

Thursday, June 19, 2008

I got a real website!

As you can tell, I have not been keeping this site updated. But I have a new website--please visit!

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

The station's playlist tracker wasn't working on Tuesday morning, so there's no playlist for this week. I don't remember what I played, but I distinctly remember that you didn't miss anything.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Stabby Rip Stab Stab

Here's today's playlist.

I have to say, the station's current primary rotation is not thrilling me. Guess I need to get in there and program some CDs that aren't mediocre indie pop bordering on mainstream emo. Of course I have heard that emo is dead. I just got over calling the emo kids punks; it's impossible to keep up with these hip monikers! (But I do get points for using the word "moniker," right?)

Dear Diary, Mood: Apathetic

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Lackadaisical Blogging is My Middle Name

Here's today's playlist. I have a one-hour show this semester rather than two, mostly because I am lazy and have trouble getting up at 4:30 in the morning.

Today's show featured a one-of-a-kind interview by Cathy from Cyberterranean (Fridays from 6-7 p.m. on WRVU) with Colin Hay, formerly of Men at Work and now of himself.

Things I love today: Donovan, Renaissance fashions, friendly dogs, poetry

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Here's today's playlist.

My daughter "Neade" slept on the couch in the station through my entire show. So cute, and so tired!

Due to construction, there will be no show next week. See you in August.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Here’s today’s playlist.

There was so much new stuff to play, I could barely fit in the David Bowie!

I have realized that I am pretty mainstream when it comes to my indie tastes. I really like the new Spoon song/single, “The Underdog.” I haven’t listened to the rest of the album yet.

Friday, July 06, 2007

No Show Tuesday, July 10

The WRVU station area will be undergoing some construction on Tuesday and thus, sadly, there will be no Alphabet that morning. Boo hoo! But we'll be back July 17.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Celebrating the Summer of Love!

Here’s what we heard today to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the wonder that was 1967:

  • Big Brother & the Holding Company “Ball & Chain”
  • Scott McKenzie “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”
  • Jimi Hendrix “I Don't Live Today”
  • The Byrds “Eight Miles High”
  • The Association “Along Comes Mary”
  • The Who “Pictures of Lily”
  • Buffalo Springfield “Mr. Soul”
  • Simon & Garfunkel “Blessed”
  • Cream “Tales of Brave Ulysses”
  • The Velvet Underground “There She Goes Again”
  • The Doors “I Looked at You”
  • The Beatles “A Day in the Life”
  • Johnny Rivers “Summer Rain”
  • The Monkees “(I'm Not Your) Steppin’ Stone”
  • The Beatles “All You Need Is Love”
  • Pink Floyd “Bike”
  • Buffalo SpringfieldBroken Arrow

And here's a link to the playlist with album information (though sometimes I cheated and got it from "Greatest Hits" or etc. but I tried to keep it real, y'all).


What’s your favorite music/memory/whatever from 1967?

Here’s the Alan Ginsberg poem I (partially) read. I made it small to preserve the line breaks.


America

By Alan Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial
for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Here's today's playlist.

I been getting into the Crosby, Stills, and Nash and also The Byrds these days.

I started thinking about this while I was on the air and ended up playing The Ramones' "The KKK Took My Baby Away" and two-and-a-half versions of "World Destruction" by Time Zone/Afrika Bambaataa/John Lydon. You can watch the video (from the epic year 1984) here on YouTube.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Time Out for Alphabet

Grigsby of Time Out for Fun (Thursdays from 6-8 a.m.) will be subbing this Tuesday while I am in Florida staring at the sea, staring at the sand. I'm alive...